Is it possible to opt out of social networking?

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/is-it-possible-to-opt-out-of-social-networking/

by indiejade • 16 years ago

40 24 16 years ago

jonoscript.wordpress.com

rm-rf• 16 years ago

Opting out of a social network doesn't sound possible, unless you can somehow maintain separate e-mail and phone numbers for each of your contacts, something that would be almost impossible to do, or if you managed to find a circle of friends that understands the privacy implications of social networks, something that is equally unlikely.

Internet social networks are like small town social networks where everyone knows who is doing what to whom, except that instead of a few hundred locals who like to gossip, the community is millions, and the motive is monitization.

tptacek• 16 years ago

Facebook doesn't need your consent to listen to your acquaintances about you. Next soap opera, please.

roundsquare3• 16 years ago

I don't think the debate is, or should be, about if facebook is doing something wrong. The bigger issue is making sure people understand the scope of facebook's information.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Opting out in that manner (not existing as far as Facebook is concerned), is effectively flat-out impossible. If other people know you exist, and a HUGE amount of people are on a website, uploading all their info, you can't prevent it. It's entirely out of your control.

As to his fear that they're associating friends by email addresses uploaded, my personal experience implies that they either don't, or it factors in very lightly. A few friends who I email with pretty regularly, and are on Facebook, and uploaded their email lists (which I am most certainly on) didn't come up as possible-friends ever. It seems to be entirely friend-of-a-friend based, and as they were in an entirely separate circle of friends, they never came up. I never bothered adding them, because we already contacted each other as needed through email / IM.

The friends it did suggest to me, though, were almost universally friends of my friends, typically with several connections, but I seriously doubt they ever had my email (or many of the in-between links, if any).

grncdr2• 16 years ago

When I signed up for facebook it suggested friends that I had no connection to outside of e-mail, and afterwards has suggested friends that again I have no connection to outside of e-mail, so my experience is in direct conflict with yours.

They do (or at least did) allow FB Connect using sites to check whether an existing e-mail address was associated with a facebook account via submitting a hashed copy (if memory serves, it's a plain md5 hash). Their developer site is down at the moment so I can't verify the exact mechanisms they (claimed) to be using to store e-mail addreses, and which e-mails they store, and what you can access through the Connect API.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

* shrug * I may not have had enough friends-through-email for them to crop up. My experiences are also with an account that's been around since I started college 5 years ago, with friends who came at nearly the same time, so it could be that they added it later. Good to know for sure that they do do this, though, thanks for the reply.

RK• 16 years ago

A friend had a similar experience, except that he didn't even try to sign up for Facebook. His email is first name + last name. @ gmail and apparently someone signed up with his email on accident. After that my friend started getting lots of automatic friend requests from people he knew. He was able get the password sent to him, since it was his email afterall, and canceled the account. Like the OP he was pretty freaked out about how much Facebook seemed to know based solely on his email.

philh• 16 years ago

>Where do we draw the line between my right to control my data, and the right of other people to exchange information about me?

When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it. The alternative is that by making your data public, you impose a burden of secrecy on those who hear you talking.

It's mildly creepy that facebook knows so much about you, but it's not a particularly new phenomenon. ("You must be Danny, Jo talks about you all the time! Tell me, did you really...") Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past.

qjz2• 16 years ago

"I don’t think that Facebook as a company is doing anything unusual or exceptionally bad."

Yet he offers an example in the article of Facebook prompting for the user's email account password, which, in my book, is insidiously evil. Sending sensitive emails to someone may not be wise, but it's hardly an example of making your data public. Facebook claims to be harvesting email addresses (which is bad enough), but the potential for abuse is enormous, considering that the company is dedicated to monetizing the private details of people's lives. Facebook shouldn't even ask for passwords, and this is one of the main reasons it's banned in our household.

nikolayav• 16 years ago

Any service that uses any sort of contact importer will need your password if you would like to get any use out of said importer.

How can anyone read your GMail contacts without your logging into your account?

If the utility of this tool is lost on you even though this password is clearly not stored anywhere, you can manually go out and find on-Facebook friends yourself.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

"Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past."

More is different.

http://www.well.com/~bbear/kellyart.html#RTFToC13

roundsquare3• 16 years ago

Facebook just hears more gossip than any one person did in the past.

At some point, a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. Facebook has definitely crossed that boundary. This does, in itself, make facebook bad, but its not just the equivalent of an absurdly gossipy person.

When you make your data public, you no longer have a right to control it.

Fair enough, but the problem is the rate at which your information becomes very public that is causing problems. In the past, if you sent someone a letter with a return address, they could make photocopies if it and send it to everyone they wanted to, but that would take a lot of time and effort. The fact that its almost automatic now will catch a lot of people by surprise. People need to understand how quickly information about them can spread so they can make informed decisions in their life.

marilyn• 16 years ago

The email contact importer thing on facebook is something that many people in my social circle thought was really neat because it made finding their friends so easy. I'll admit, that I used it when I first joined facebook a few years back.

In retrospect I wish I hadn't used it, as this article mentions, I not only gave away pieces of my personal information, I gave away personal information that didn't even belong to me, it belonged to my contacts. Now, it seems quite dubious that facebook has the gall to ask for my email password. It is true that hindsight it 20/20.

GavinB2• 16 years ago

We're moving from an information-poor world to an information-rich one. There is really no way to stop the loss of privacy. The draconian legislation required would, themselves, create a tremendous loss of privacy.

We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And, ultimately, neither is preventable.

moe• 16 years ago

We've moved from file sharing "piracy" to personal information "piracy." And, ultimately, neither is preventable.

Sounds catchy but makes no sense at all. The two are not even related.

Also "personal information piracy" is a strange description of people giving out their information voluntarily. This can be trivially prevented by simply not typing that information into a website...

GavinB2• 16 years ago

Piracy can be "trivally prevented" by not publishing content. The similarity is that once it's out there in any form, you lose control over it. The two are most definitely related.

The whole point of the article was that it's not you giving the information out. Once it's out in the world, via your friends knowing it, you can't choose whether or not it gets entered. Tiny bits of periphery evidence end up being a lot of information about you.

They're sharing something of yours without your consent. That's what the term "piracy" is supposed to mean.

wedesoft• 16 years ago

Eben Moglen's talk 'Freedom in the Cloud' from last Friday might be relevant in this context: http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338

bootload• 16 years ago

"... And they had a lot more than my email address. They had pictures of me, uploaded by my friends and tagged with my name. They knew who my friends were. They knew what my friends liked. They knew more or less how I would fit into their social network. If they wanted to, they could deduce a lot of information about the person behind the email address. ..."

Thanks greatly for that link. Moglen is a great speaker and his idea of the "Freedom box" (personal servers where you own the logs) goes a long way, to paraphrase Moglen: to put "Zuc" into receivership.

wicknicks• 16 years ago

How much privacy does one share with his housemates/spouse/siblings? Pretty much nothing. Facebook is one big house where everyone gets to know about each other's activities. Though such sharing might be unacceptable to certain people, most people (especially college under graduates and younger) love it. So this is probably the future!

At the same time, it must be remembered that facebook never forces anyone to share their personal information. You do have control over who sees what.

josefresco• 16 years ago

Update your debate stats. Facebook's biggest growth is older women, and they're losing the 20-somethings to Twitter and...

SamAtt• 16 years ago

The irony of this article is the only way for him to get the control he wants is to be on Facebook and monitor what is put up about him. Only then will he be able to see what he doesn't approve of and ask those people to not put them up.

Is it possible to opt out of social networking?

Related Stories